Facebook thinks that mobile phones are changing the world, and sees a future where everything starts with our mobile-connected lives. What follows from that, if done right, can be happy users and profitable businesses.

This week, thousands of mobile company executives and others are gathered in Barcelona, Spain for Mobile World Congress. Yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg keynoted there, explaining that Internet.org, the company’s nonprofit effort to bring connectivity to new users in developing countries, is helping carriers win new customers.

Today, Facebook is sharing its thoughts on the trends in a mobile-first future. In a blog post, Jane Schachtel, the company’s global head of technology and mobile strategy, explained her vision for that future.

“Mobile phones have existed in one form or another for more than 30 years now, and every day they’re becoming more entwined in people’s lives,” Facebook wrote in its post. “But we are only in the early days of living in a mobile world. Today, a person’s mobile experience depends largely on where they live.”

In the developed world, countless people are using high-end Android phones and iPhones, and connecting via fast mobile networks, while in developing nations, networks are slower, and more people use basic phones. “For many people in these countries mobile phones are also a first point of entry to the Internet.”

With that in mind, here’s Schachtel’s look at the five trends she sees for the future.

More affordable smartphones. Schachtel noted that she foresees significant innovation in the proliferation of low-cost smartphones “that offer better performance and better features for less money.” The benefits, she said, are that more people will get connected, and manufacturers will find new customers by targeting their devices at specific demographics, like millennials, “hoping they’ll become future long-term customers.”

New focus on mobile commerce. As more and more people are conducting transactions via their mobile devices. But there’s still huge untapped opportunity there, Schachtel noted. “More technology and telecom businesses need to adapt their business models to mobile, and I expect to see new solutions from operators that make it easier for people to buy and sell things through their phones.”

Differentiation. In many developed countries, Schachtel said, it’s hard for device makers to stand out as almost everyone already has a phone, many of which look the same and offer more or less the same features. Without standing out, manufacturers struggle to build brand loyalty, and in the process deal with increased customer churn. But by finding ways to make their devices more personal to users — “focusing, for instance, on the emotional role they play in our lives rather than the latest technical specs” — manufacturers could reverse that trend. That would be aided by getting users to buy more products from the device makers, Schachtel said. “Device manufacturers are now introducing gadgets like watches and selfie-cams to pair with phones and tablets,” a dynamic known as “device families.”

Better network capabilities. In the first world, users are consuming huge amounts of video content, Schachtel said, and that trend will only increase. As a result, carriers have little choice but to boost their networks’ capabilities and reliability. “I expect to see lots about 5G networks, as well as ways of delivering video to more people on slower networks. … It’s become essential to understand creative best practices for mobile experiences, and the changing ways in which people consume video.”

Making the Internet of Things important. Schachtel said she expects the near future to be filled with talk about the Internet of Things — connected devices like the Nest smart thermostat or the August smart lock — and what she called “machine to machine” connections. Too, she said, Apple’s watch will likely spawn large numbers of second-gen smart watches. “With the Internet of Things, the big challenge remains showing people how connected devices can be meaningful additions to their lives, rather than just being cool pieces of tech.”

In the end, Schachtel concluded, mobile means great opportunities and exciting times for users and businesses. “As more people come online and new technologies become more widely available,” she wrote, “we’ll continue to see more sophisticated solutions for connecting the world. And that’s good for people, and good for businesses.”

Twitter’s Digits, the social network’s login product, will now let developers request access to the contacts on users’ phones through what it’s calling a “friend-finding”’ tool.

Digits, which Twitter launched in October, allows users to sign up for and log in to apps or Web-based services using their phone numbers.

Now, in an update geared to extending social graphs to apps, Digits is letting developers ask users for their current contacts, Twitter said this morning. The company made it clear that process is a request, and doesn’t require users to agree to share those contacts.

“While social networking services give you the full list of your users’ friends, those connections may not be up to date or relevant to the app experience you’re delivering,” Twitter wrote in a blog post. “On the other hand, contact lists on your users’ phones have the strongest, most current connections — but it can be cumbersome to build custom code to import those lists and match the contacts to create a social graph.”

According to Twitter, friend-finding gives developers the ability to build social graphs around their apps. “Digits will match both mutual or one-way connections so users who are already on the service will know immediately which of their contacts are also using your app,” Twitter said, “and they can also be alerted when a friend joins later.”

Twitter thinks that friend-finding will improve users’ experience in other ways, as well, such as personalizing content, showing what people’s friends purchased, or what level they’ve reached in a gamified app.

The Digits update also includes two-step verification, which lets user log in to apps with their phone number, set up a code, which they will be prompted for on future sign-in attempts.

Businesses are cooler to this kind of communication, but today’s announcement by Intercom of a revamped messaging platform for business-to-customer communications could help change that.

The San Francisco-based company provides customer communication services that brands can embed in their sites or applications. Previously, its services included the ability to send personalized announcements of various lengths to customers.

The newly launched capability is offering what the company describes as “modern messaging” for logged-in users, inspired by consumers apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger.

“Messaging on the consumer side is massive, arguably the killer app of mobile,” Intercom product manager Brian Donohue told me. “On the business side, it’s an open question.”

Such modern messaging allows participants to immediately communicate with each other in a live chat, but the communication also exists as a persistent thread for asynchronous talk. The older live chat, which Intercom compares to a phone call, was designed around both parties communicating in real time. When you left the chat, the conversation was over for you.

Above: A screen showing the business’ side of a messaging conversation in Intercom

With messaging, on the other hand, you can send a message, photo, or video, come back the next day, and pick up the conversation thread where you left off — notwithstanding comments from other participants in the meantime. It’s like a private, ongoing chat room.

For businesses, messaging can tap into the huge popularity of the consumer apps — which, as many parents have learned, is the only communication tool their children want to use. Intercom’s customers include Hubspot, Home Depot, and New Relic.

Businesses can also tap into Intercom’s analytics, integration with customer profiles, and event-based messaging triggers, not to mention the fact that customers can continue the conversation with the business at any time.

Intercom’s implementation also allows a business to message the customer and, if there’s no response, to send the same message via email. The conversation can then continue in email, for those of us who still employ that ancient technique.

While consumer messaging is packed with competitors, business messaging is still emerging.

Manager of communications Aaron Forman pointed to live chat vendors Zopim, Olark, and LiveChat as competing in the same business communication space. He noted that Zendesk offers Zopim as a real-time messaging client, but “it’s not integrated.”

In contrast, Forman said, Intercom is “the only company enabling both web and mobile businesses to talk to their customers inside their applications” via real-time messaging.

]]>0Intercom brings consumer-like messaging to business applicationsSocial platform Spredfast lands $24M to better follow what you’re postinghttp://venturebeat.com/2015/03/03/social-platform-spredfast-lands-24m-to-better-follow-what-youre-posting/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/03/social-platform-spredfast-lands-24m-to-better-follow-what-youre-posting/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 15:00:00 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1671368Spredfast's social platform was used in this year's Super Bowl so that some of the posts and tweets would be shown on air and in the stadium during the game.
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Your posts and tweets are gold nuggets to brands.

Today, one of the leading platforms for mining those conversations and managing responses, Spredfast, announced it has scored $24 million in new investment.

The company reports more than 600 customers, including the five major broadcast networks. To get a sense of how the Spredfast platform can be used by those customers, take the example of this year’s Super Bowl.

“The NFL was looking to accomplish two goals,” Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron told me via email. The first was “creating a process to consume the massive conversation taking place around the big game,” so that some of the posts and tweets would be shown on air and in the stadium during the game.

The second goal, he said, was to “efficiently monitor and respond to the flood of questions from fans on the ground in Arizona.” Students from Arizona State University’s Cronkite School, Favaron said, replied to posts with “NFL-approved answers around logistics, hospitality, tickets, and other relevant questions,” using Spredfast’s Conversations tool.

The new funding, from Silver Lake Waterman, will be employed to develop “smart technology with top talent,” he said. It will also be used to help grow the company’s international presence “even more aggressively.”

Speaking on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke passionately about bringing Internet connectivity to as many people in the world as possible. But he and executives from several mobile carriers also said that giving people in developing nations free access to the Internet can be a big driver of business over time.

Zuckerberg has been on a world tour of sorts over the past few months promoting Internet.org, the company’s initiative to connect people in developing nations. He has visited Colombia and India, and the company also now offers the service, in cooperation with regional mobile operators, in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana, as well as India and Colombia.

Zuckerberg began his talk by touting how Internet access — in conjunction with Facebook’s service — helps people connect with friends and family, and share with each other, as well as open up business opportunities between companies and customers. It also can give people access to health information and give them ways to access new jobs.

He said that to date, Internet.org has helped its mobile operators grow their subscriber bases. And that’s vital, he said, because “the only way we can accelerate (Internet.org) is if we can grow the operators’ business.”

Asked if Facebook would like to work with Google on Internet.org in the future, he said that the service launched with Google search in Zambia.

He also noted that while many in the media want to write about connectivity experiments Facebook and Google are doing — drones and balloons — “that’s the fringe of the real work going on. Ninety percent of the world already live within range of a network.”

Among other stats about Internet.org shared today: More than 500 million new people now have access to Internet-based tools; Almost 7 million people used mobile data for the first time; and operators in Internet.org countries have seen acquisition rates for new customers increase by 40 percent.

On stage with operators

Zuckerberg was joined on stage in Barcelona by Jon Fredrik Baksaas, the chairman of GSMA and president and CEO of Telenor, as well as Christian De Faria, the CEO of Airtel Africa, and Mario Zanotti, the senior vice president of operations for Millicom. Their conversation focused on ways that Internet.org has been good for the carriers’ bottom lines as more and more people have begun using data and mobile services for the first time — and started to see the value to their lives.

Internet.org and Facebook can be great for the mobile operators, Zuckerberg said. That’s because Facebook drives data usage, and people understanding for the first time that they want Internet connectivity will also drive usage of mobile networks.

There’s a lot of people who didn’t grow up with the Internet, he said. “If you ask them they want a data plan, you first have to explain why they want to be on the Internet. So that’s why we’re offering free services.”

Doing that, he said, gives people the tools they need to be online. And that, in turn, will be good for mobile carriers.

In Paraguay, it seems to be working. There, according to Zanotti, there’s been a 30 percent increase in data use, and more people are now paying for mobile services. And that was the goal, Zanotti said: “The free model [of Internet.org] is for a limited time. After that, people become paying subscribers.”

From Zuckerberg’s perspective, Facebook is looking to create a model that is profitable for operators to keep in perpetuity. “The more people that are upgrading to paid data … then we will continue using free services. As long as that’s true … [it] will make sense to keep the [Internet.org] experience going long term.”

Facebook, by bringing people a flood of new kinds of information via users’ News Feed, is giving new Internet users a rationale for why they may eventually want to pay for a data plan.

And while Zuckerberg noted that Facebook is often “conflated” with Internet.org, the two are not one and the same. Rather, Internet.org couldn’t exist without the participation of mobile carriers and those companies being willing to invest signficant amounts of money in the infrastructure that brings new connectivity to communities.

But hopefully, Zuckerberg added, over time, those companies will reap the rewards for their efforts and will make more money.

]]>0MWC: Zuckerberg, mobile carriers talk bottom line benefits of Internet.orgRockYou raises $23M in funding based on its business of running older gameshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/03/02/rockyou-raises-23m-in-funding-based-on-business-of-operating-older-games/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/02/rockyou-raises-23m-in-funding-based-on-business-of-operating-older-games/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 16:12:54 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1671212RockYou acquires aging social games and operates them at a profit.
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Click here for all of GameBeat’s 2015 Game Developers Conference coverage.

RockYou has raised $23 million in funding from Columbia Capital as part of its strategy of operating aging social games at a profit.

Above: Lisa Marino of RockYou

Image Credit: RockYou

San Francisco-based RockYou has expanded over the past couple of years by acquiring social games from Disney (Kitchen Scramble, Words of Wonder, City Girl, Gardens of Time) and Kabam (the Facebook and web versions of Kingdoms of Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis). It makes money from these by running in-game ads to the players.

The company’s in-game video advertising platform currently delivers over 1 billion impressions a month, placing RockYou in the Top 10 of ComScore’s Top 100 Video Properties for January 2015, the company said.

“Over the past two years, we have built a media company that grows audiences at scale for an app-driven, multiplatform world. That effort is paying off, both for our content partners and players of these popular games,” said RockYou CEO Lisa Marino in a statement. “With Columbia Capital’s vote of confidence, we now have the flexibility to build our business even more aggressively.”

RockYou will use this funding from Columbia Capital to continue growing and diversifying its audience through partnerships with developers of established, still-popular games. It will also expand its mobile catalog.

“RockYou has transformed itself into a leading digital media platform with superior reach and engagement,” said Jeff Patterson, a partner at Columbia Capital, in a statement. “We are excited to back an innovative and scalable platform, run by a truly world-class team, that provides an impressive solution for developers to sustain monetization from their game libraries. We believe that we are just on the cusp of greater things to come as RockYou extends deeper into the game ecosystem and continues to expand into mobile.”

RockYou has more than 92 million consumers on mobile, Facebook, and the Web.

]]>0RockYou raises $23M in funding based on its business of running older gamesNinja Metrics shows which ad networks are really delivering the most social and lucrative usershttp://venturebeat.com/2015/03/02/ninja-metrics-shows-which-ad-networks-are-really-delivering-the-most-social-and-lucrative-users/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/02/ninja-metrics-shows-which-ad-networks-are-really-delivering-the-most-social-and-lucrative-users/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 16:00:44 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668240The Katana analytics system can now make ad spending 40% more efficient as a result.
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Click here for all of GameBeat’s 2015 Game Developers Conference coverage.

Ninja Metrics spent a long time building Katana, its social predictive analytics engine. And now it really looks like it’s paying off, and the truth of the research is quite fascinating.

By identifying users who bring “social value” to games, the Los Angeles startup said it can identify the ad networks that deliver more of these valuable players than others. And as a result, it can make a developer’s ad spending 40 percent more efficient. Ninja Metrics may be able to eventually do something quite explosive: identify which ad networks are really the worst at delivering what they say they will.

Above: Dmitri Williams

Image Credit: Ninja Metrics

It all starts with some of the fundamental research that Ninja Metrics has done on people who are social butterflies in games. Dmitri Williams, chief executive of Ninja Metrics, said in an interview with GamesBeat that his company gives marketers the ability to assess the true ad value of a user, which is different from the immediately observable value. He’s giving a talk on the subject at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The analytics work with PC, console, and mobile games and apps.

“We do the social value calculation to find out what players are truly worth,” Williams said. “Some are worth more or less than you think.”

Most analytics engines don’t identify “social whales,” or the people who cause spending in multiplayer games. Williams said that these people are like the life of the party. They get their friends to go to a bar and spend money on drinks. They may not spend much themselves, but if they weren’t around, those friends wouldn’t spend any money at the bar. In mobile and online games, these players are hidden. Most analytics engines pay attention to the payers, or whales, who spend money. They discard the social whales because they aren’t really looking for them.

But the social whales have a great deal of social value and influence. Ninja Metrics can find these people, and it has found that some ad networks have more of them than others. That means that the value of that ad network changes, based on how much social value its players have. Ninja Metrics has taken its data and studied a collection of ad networks. It isn’t yet publicly identifying the worst ones, but it will reveal the data to its paying customers, Williams said.

If developers redirect their spending to emphasize the ad networks with the social users, the return on investment increases 40 percent, he said. That results in a more accurate reflection of True Ad Value. The Katana Social Analytics Engine ties in-game social behavior and player influence back to the advertising referral source, allowing companies to track their return on investment for each advertising source.

Ninja Metrics can also apply this analysis to territories, so it has figured out which countries have the most social users and which ones have the least social users. Some countries have a lot of social users, logically, because they are poor countries where the users don’t have much money. They cause a lot of social activity and spending, but don’t have much money to spend. The richer countries have fewer of these people. Germany’s social value is 8.64 percent worse than observed, while Argentina’s is 99.63 percent better than it appears to be. This means that translation could be a very good investment in a game.

Williams said that one strategy is to mix the players together, in terms of grouping them together in the same location or server within a game. The social users will cause the players with a lot of money to spend more, and the result will be good for game revenues. Each player has a social value, like a credit, and influenceability, which is like a debit.

Research has borne this out, Williams said. One person may cause three friends to spend $243 in a month. If that player drops out, then their spending drops by $243. In an actual case, the drop was $236.

Here’s where the results are fascinating. Mobile single-player games get about 6 percent of their revenue from social value. People talk to each other about playing their single-player games, and that results in spending. With mobile social games 28 percent of the revenue comes from social value. PC hardcore multiplayer games have 30 percent of their revenue from social value. And with massively multiplayer online games, 60 percent of the money comes from social value. And, not surprisingly, those games are quite profitable.

“This is first direct evidence anywhere of value of people in games,” Williams said. “That is a big deal scientifically. A year ago, we thought social value mattered. Now we now it. In MMOs, identity is much stronger. You have persistence and stronger teams and better tools for dialogue and coordination. There’s a big payoff for a community manager, even though you can find it on the profit-and-loss statement.”

It all makes sense. But Ninja Metrics is more useful in figuring out who is delivering and who isn’t. One ad network, for instance, performs 2.5 percent better than was readily observed because of its hidden social value. Another was 12 percent worse than observed. The best ad network has a 193 percent improvement over observed value.

“I can’t name names publicly yet,” Williams said. “But clearly, one is over-delivering and one is under-delivering.”

There’s also huge variance based on types of creative ads. One type is 900 percent better, while another type is 70 percent worse than observed value.

“This means that creative advertising matters a ton,” Williams said. “As (former U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis once said, ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant. You optimize with the truth, not smoke and magic.'”

Others might try to copy the research, but Williams said it is patented.

Above: Social Value report from Ninja Metrics

Image Credit: Ninja Metrics

]]>0Ninja Metrics shows which ad networks are really delivering the most social and lucrative usersGoogle’s Sundar Pichai: Here’s how we’re taking apart Google+ and rethinking ithttp://venturebeat.com/2015/03/02/googles-sundar-pichai-heres-how-were-taking-apart-google-and-rethinking-it/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/02/googles-sundar-pichai-heres-how-were-taking-apart-google-and-rethinking-it/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 14:12:47 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1671094Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on March 6 Pacific! Following confirmation of a shakeup at Google+, Sundar Pichai said today the company was also splitting the social networking service into two pieces. In an […]
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Following confirmation of a shakeup at Google+, Sundar Pichai said today the company was also splitting the social networking service into two pieces.

In an interview on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Pichai, senior vice president for products at Google, said the company had viewed Google+ as having two main components: a stream of activity and a social layer.

The social layer, for Google, was really about how people shared items across its various services, from YouTube to Google Docs. The company plans to peel that off and focus on it even more, though Pichai did not offer a lot of details on that.

For the stream, however, Pichai said the real value for people has been photos. And so the company is going to put a renewed focus on photos, also separating that into its own product.

“Photos are a big use case,” Pichai said. “So we are going to say this is the stream now.”

Google Hangouts will also be separated out and getting additional investment and resources from the company, Pichai said.

Pichai didn’t offer a timetable for the changes, nor did he say directly that Google would kill the activity stream on Google+, but that seems entirely likely.

Earlier today, Google exec Bradley Horowitz confirmed reports that he had been placed in charge of Google+. In his post, he also referenced the coming changes.

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products!” Horowitz wrote. “It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

]]>0Google’s Sundar Pichai: Here’s how we’re taking apart Google+ and rethinking itThe ‘connected car’ is creating a massive new business opportunity for auto, tech, and telecom companieshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/03/01/the-connected-car-is-creating-a-massive-new-business-opportunity-for-auto-tech-and-telecom-companies/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/01/the-connected-car-is-creating-a-massive-new-business-opportunity-for-auto-tech-and-telecom-companies/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 03:30:40 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?post_type=vb_syndicated&p=1670676By 2020, 75 percent of cars shipped globally will be built with the necessary hardware to connect to the Internet.
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Self-driving cars generate a lot of headlines. But there’s already a new kind of car on the road that’s completely changing the vehicle market.

The connected car is equipped with Internet connections and software that allow people to stream music, look up movie times, be alerted of traffic and weather conditions, and even power driving-assistance services such as self-parking.

By 2020, BI Intelligence estimates, 75 percent of cars shipped globally will be built with the necessary hardware to connect to the Internet.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we take a deep dive into the connected-car market. We size the market for connected cars, determine the average selling price and how it will decline over time, and assess different manufacturers’ approaches.

]]>0The ‘connected car’ is creating a massive new business opportunity for auto, tech, and telecom companiesShakeup at Google! Bradley Horowitz reportedly now running Google+http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/01/shakeup-at-google-bradley-horowitz-reportedly-now-running-google/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/01/shakeup-at-google-bradley-horowitz-reportedly-now-running-google/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 01:37:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1670892David Besbris, the former head of Google's social network, is said to be out.
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It’s not clear what Google’s plans are — the company did not immediately respond to a VentureBeat request for comment — but if recent signals are correct, it could be that Google+ will be losing some of its features.

In an interview with Forbes, Google product czar Sundar Pichai suggested that Google+ could be broken up over time. Many people think the search giant has all but lost the social networking battle to Facebook.

]]>0Shakeup at Google! Bradley Horowitz reportedly now running Google+Facebook’s ‘active’ users aren’t so active anymore, says survey datahttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/facebooks-active-users-arent-so-active-anymore-says-survey-data/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/facebooks-active-users-arent-so-active-anymore-says-survey-data/#commentsSat, 28 Feb 2015 00:15:17 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669882Guest:While Facebook’s active user numbers are in decline, its member and visitor numbers are either holding steady or increasing. Clearly, we have a large group of Facebookers who are checking the site but not actually contributing to it.
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Although headline writers like nothing more than proclaiming Facebook’s demise, the simple truth is that it remains at the very core of social networking – having more members and active users than any of its rivals.

But while Facebook’s global dominance is beyond doubt, some key questions remain. Is Facebook still growing, for example? And how many people are really using it? Facebook continues to announce quarter-on-quarter increases in “active user” numbers, but we know that the social media landscape is more competitive than ever and that Facebook no longer has the type of all-encompassing appeal it once commanded. Why aren’t these factors impacting the company’s self-published figures? Is it a question of definitions?

My company, GlobalWebIndex, tracks active usage across all of the world’s major social platforms, surveying 200,000 Internet users annually about their networking behaviors, and our data tells a very different story. If we look at the top 10 social networks and compare our Q4 2013 results against those from Q4 2014, Facebook is the only one that saw a decline in active user numbers (dropping 6 points). Meanwhile, Twitter and Google+ held steady, and all of the rest saw increases – with Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Badoo posting particularly healthy rises.

So, what’s going on here? First, Facebook’s definition of an active user is now so broad that you can do very little on the site and still be counted within its figures. Secondly, and just as importantly, GlobalWebIndex’s data shows that, while Facebook’s active user numbers are undergoing consistent declines, its member and visitor numbers are either holding steady or increasing. Clearly, we have a large group of Facebookers who are checking the site but not actually contributing to it – to such an extent that they don’t even consider themselves to be “active users.” It’s not that the site is losing active users per se, then, it’s that users are evolving into passive users – individuals who still visit Facebook but who use alternative networks or apps for activities such as photo-sharing and direct messaging.

To find evidence for this, we need look no further than the U.S. and U.K. (which, as Facebook’s oldest two markets, are typically seen as bellwethers for wider trends). Of the 15,000 people we surveyed in these two countries, half of Facebook’s members said they were using it less than before (rising to two thirds among teens). The main reasons for this were pretty revealing: A fifth said they were just not as interested in the site as they used to be. A similar number said they were simply bored of the network. That’s hardly surprising for a site that’s been around for over a decade, but it’s an issue the service itself has been (understandably) reticent to acknowledge.

According to our data, over a quarter of Facebook members are now “logging in to see what’s happening without posting/commenting on anything.” Tellingly, these Facebook “browsers” are more likely to be using chat apps, more likely to be on smaller networks such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and more likely to be 16-24. All of these individuals will be counted as active by Facebook but, in reality, an active user in 2015 is quite different from an active user earlier in the decade.

To keep investors and commentators happy, it’s inevitable that Facebook will continue to announce quarter-on-quarter increases in active user numbers; it is simply too perilous to unveil any decline. But it’s now having to look to fast-growth markets – where Internet populations continue to expand rapidly each year – to add new members in any meaningful quantities. Examine year-on-year behaviors and like-for-like user numbers in mature markets like the US and UK, and it’s abundantly clear that active usage on Facebook is declining. Little wonder, then, that it’s experimenting with services like Facebook at Work as well as a dedicated Tor browser version; both are designed to increase engagement among existing audiences rather than win new users. In the face of so much competition, Facebook knows that it needs ways to energize, and re-energize, its easily distracted user base.

Of course, perspective is essential here; Facebook might have become the site that it’s no longer terribly cool to say you use or like, but it’s still the number one global service (and by quite some distance). What’s more, Facebook’s Atlas platform is underpinned by the proposition of reaching specific audiences; that means people don’t need to be actively engaging with Facebook for ads to be targeted accurately. They just need to be visiting the site or have the app installed. So, as long as membership and visitation rates remain strong – as they are – profits will follow.

]]>0Facebook’s ‘active’ users aren’t so active anymore, says survey dataWhat color is #TheDress? Facebook is analyzing your answers to this question, too, of coursehttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/what-color-is-thedress-facebook-is-analyzing-your-answers-to-this-question-too-of-course/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/what-color-is-thedress-facebook-is-analyzing-your-answers-to-this-question-too-of-course/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 23:49:16 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1670122The Internet went nuts yesterday debating the color of a striped dress. Facebook analyzed the debate and came up with some data on who supported which color combination.
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The question of the color of the now-famous dress has been debated ad nauseam. But now data from Facebook suggests whether you were on Team Blue and Black or Team Gold and White depends on how old you are, whether you were on a computer or a mobile device, and even whether you’re male or female.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might need to hop on over to BuzzFeed and join the more than 31 million people that have viewed their now record-breaking post that looks at whether a striped dress that went viral on Tumblr is actually blue and black or gold and white.

The debate got so heated yesterday that it nearly took BuzzFeed down, not to mention swamping Thursday’s other huge meme, the escaped llamas. “Last night saw one of those beautiful moments made possible by the interconnected age we live in,” Facebook wrote. “Someone posted a picture of a dress, and the Internet lost its collective mind.”

Facebook, of course, is the kind of place where countless people were weighing in on the topic, so it is a natural place to investigate the demographics of who saw the dress one way and who saw it the other.

“The younger a person was, the more likely they were to believe the dress was black and blue,” the Facebook data science team wrote in a post analyzing yesterday’s dress madness. “All other things being equal, a whopping 10 percent more of 13-17 year old users were on team Black and Blue, compared to 55-64 year old users.”

Is that because of changes in people’s eyes as they age? Facebook’s data doesn’t address that, unfortunately, but that would be one obvious conclusion. Unless it has something to do with the kinds of color schemes that different age groups identify with.

At the same time, there appeared to be differences in how people viewed the colors of the dress, depending on whether they were looking at pictures of it on a computer or on a mobile device.

“We wondered if the interface used by the person might have something to do with the percentage,” Facebook wrote. “After all, the same image might visually look very different depending on the light signature of the device used to view it. Making the assumption that people posted to Facebook on the same device they used to view the image, this was indeed the case: relative to people posting from a computer, 6 percent more iPhone users said that the dress was white and gold, while this number was 7 percent for Android users!”

This might have something to do with location, since, as the post notes, those on mobile devices are more likely to be outside, where there would be glare on the screen that might affect how colors on that screen are interpreted.

There are other demographic factors that might have affected what dress team you were on, according to Facebook. Men, for example, were found to be 6 percent more likely to be on Team Black and Blue than women, likely because more men than women are color blind.

But in the end, judging by Facebook’s data, it sure looks like the dress was gold and white. “In all, 42 percent of Facebook users choosing a side were on team Black and Blue, while 58 percent were on team White and Gold.”

Earlier this week, Paavo Siljamäki, director at the record label Anjunabeats, told a very interesting story about an interaction with a Facebook engineer logging into his account without entering his account credentials. We got in touch with Facebook to learn when exactly the company’s employees can perform such actions.

Here is Siljamäki’s account of what happened:

In short, Siljamäki says he was asked if a Facebook employee could “look” at his profile, to which he gave permission. The engineer then accessed the account without entering Siljamäki’s password.

A Facebook spokesperson gave us the following statement:

We have rigorous administrative, physical, and technical controls in place to restrict employee access to user data. Our controls have been evaluated by independent third parties and confirmed multiple times by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s Office as part of their audit of our practices.

Access is tiered and limited by job function, and designated employees may only access the amount of information that’s necessary to carry out their job responsibilities, such as responding to bug reports or account support inquiries. Two separate systems are in place to detect suspicious patterns of behavior, and these systems produce reports once per week which are reviewed by two independent security teams.

We have a zero tolerance approach to abuse, and improper behavior results in termination.

So yes, Facebook has a customer service tool that can grant access to a user’s account. That said, it is apparently heavily monitored and controlled, requires consent from the user, and can only be used in specific cases by a select group of employees.

If you are among those Facebook employees whose job responsibilities require you to use this tool, you’re given a stern warning when you’re hired. In layman’s terms, the easiest way to get fired is to abuse this tool. Abuses of power are always possible, however, and that’s why Facebook says it keeps a tight lid on this tool.

As for the case above, the Facebook employee in question was responding to a specific problem Siljamäki had and got permission to resolve the issue. In other words, unless you’re asking Facebook for help with something and have given permission, you probably don’t need to worry about a Facebook employee accessing your account.

On the flipside, Facebook is a service that resides on the web. As such, all Internet rules apply to Facebook, including: If you’re worried about keeping something completely private, don’t put it online.

]]>0Facebook explains when employees can access your account without your passwordGroup-chatting app Blupe, an offspring of China’s Momo, launches today in the U.S.http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/group-chatting-app-blupe-an-offspring-of-chinas-momo-launches-today-in-the-u-s/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/group-chatting-app-blupe-an-offspring-of-chinas-momo-launches-today-in-the-u-s/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:30:19 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668065A new social app needs a niche, and Blupe's is the interest group. You can only chat with other group members, and anyone can create a group.
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Blupe may sound like a big bubble surfacing, but in this context it’s the name of a new, group-oriented social app that launches today.

It’s a wholly-owned offspring of Momo, a social app used by more than 180 million Chinese to discover and chat with people nearby. Momo founding team member and now Blupe CEO/founder Sichuan Zhang has relocated to San Francisco from Beijing, assembling a team to build and launch the app.

A new social app needs a niche, and Blupe’s is the interest group. You can only chat with other group members, and anyone can create a group. A group can have between two and 100 users, who must participate within 60 miles of each other. A group founder is in control, able to admit new members or boot out unruly ones.

“I recently moved into a new apartment” in the San Francisco area, Zhang told me. Because it’s a new building, she said, there’s still construction going on. To help share information about construction-related issues, she created an apartment group on Blupe, which scored two members after two days.

“We can chat about what’s going on here,” Zhang said. “It’s very convenient.”

As it moves from its beta phase with several thousand users and hundreds of groups, the free app is hunkered down for the time being, focusing on user growth.

“There are many [monetization] opportunities for location-based apps,” Zhang pointed out. Possibilities could include location-specific offers or the kinds of premium memberships Momo is offering.

]]>0Group-chatting app Blupe, an offspring of China’s Momo, launches today in the U.S.Google reverses porn ban on Blogger after backlashhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/google-reverses-porn-ban-on-blogger-after-backlash/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/google-reverses-porn-ban-on-blogger-after-backlash/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 09:48:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669655Just three days after announcing it was banning sexually explicit material on Blogger, Google changed its mind after an outcry from many longtime users.
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Just three days after announcing it was banning sexually explicit material on Blogger, Google said today it had changed its mind after an outcry from many longtime users of the blogging platform.

“This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy,” wrote Jessica Pelegio, social product support manager at Google, in a post in a product forum. “We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”

That existing policy requires blog owners with explicit content to mark them as “adult.” That triggers an “adult content” warning page.

Under that policy change, which had been set to take effect on March 23, Google said it would make private any blog with explicit content. Porn was going to be expressly forbidden on any new blogs created after that date.

The company did not say at the time why it had decided to make the change, more than a decade after it had acquired Blogger.

Such moves are bound to be controversial. Almost two years ago, Tumblr was heavily criticized after removing blogs with explicit content from its search functions. Following a similar backlash, Tumblr also reversed course.

]]>0Google reverses porn ban on Blogger after backlashDylan’s Desk: Why the coming messaging economy will be very big businesshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/dylans-desk-why-the-coming-messaging-economy-will-be-very-big-business/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/dylans-desk-why-the-coming-messaging-economy-will-be-very-big-business/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 01:05:23 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669271Opinion:There's a deep shift in the way we communicate happening, and it's about to turn media and marketing businesses upside-down.
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There’s a deep shift in the way we communicate happening, and it’s about to turn media and marketing businesses upside-down.

In short, the Web-based world is about to become secondary to the message-based world.

Messaging apps like WhatsApp (now part of Facebook), WeChat, Line, Snapchat, and Kik are sitting pretty in this new world. That’s because they’re the apps that young people increasingly use to communicate. Some striking stats:

WhatsApp: 700 million monthly active users

WeChat: 468 million monthly active users

Line: 181 million monthly active users

SnapChat: 100 million monthly active users

Tango: 70 million monthly active users

Kik, whose cofounder and chief technical officer Chris Best was on a panel discussion with me earlier this week, doesn’t report monthly active users for some reason. Instead, it reports that it has 200 million registered users — of which some unknown, smaller proportion are active users. Tango also reports 200 million registered users, so we can estimate that Kik, like Tango, probably has about 1/3 as many active users, or about 70 million.

At first glance, you might wonder what the big deal is. Why does anyone need one of these apps to communicate when we’ve already got email, instant messengers from Facebook, Google or AOL, and SMS-based text messages?

The answer is complex, but boils down — I think — to the fact that these message apps let people create unique identities that aren’t tied to their email accounts or phone numbers, and they support a wider range of content. You can send funny GIFs to your friends. You can send them custom stickers. You can send them goofy selfies that (usually) disappear in a few seconds. You can play games with them.

And, increasingly, you can read the news or make purchases via message apps.

In this, the U.S. is a bit behind Asia, where you can even buy insurance and apply for a mortgage via WeChat. But transactional features are coming to our shores.

And even more: One new startup out of Y Combinator called Magic is promising to fulfill whatever it is you need — whether that’s a pizza and a Pepsi, an order of sushi and some flowers, or a tiger. Magic works via SMS right now, but it’s easy to imagine it working in any of the major messaging apps.

Web- and content-based businesses, like Google and Facebook, will have to recalibrate their entire business models. (Facebook seems to understand this, and was willing to spend an enormous amount, $22 billion, in acquiring WhatsApp as a hedge against this message-centric future.) That goes double for publishers like Yahoo, Buzzfeed, Vox Media, the New York Times, and, yes, VentureBeat.

Apps that aren’t message-centric will need to transform themselves, or else find a way to insert themselves into the message economy somehow. Instagram’s recent direct message feature is a perfect example of a content-centric app trying to turn itself into a messaging app.

For marketers, messaging apps are incredibly tempting — and potentially revolutionary. Kik, for instance, says that 70 percent of the branded messages it has sent to its users are opened in the first hour, an enormous open rate. That’s not based on a small sample size, either: It has sent 100 million of these messages to date. What’s more, it says that the click-through rates on those messages are 10 to 50 times higher than on Twitter or Facebook. The reason it’s seeing such high rates of engagement are because people have already opted-in to receive those message. If you’re following Funny or Die (a content partner on Kik), you’ve already self-selected as someone who is interested in that brand’s content. Also, Kik limits marketers to just four branded messages per month, to help keep the frequency low and the novelty high.

Other message-centric apps are taking different approaches. WhatsApp claims that it will not carry advertising — though that’s the fundamental raison d’etre for its parent company, Facebook, so we’ll see how long that lasts. Snapchat has just started to experiment with making money. WeChat hasn’t made nearly the traction here that it has seen in Asia, and offers fewer features to its English-speaking users (and marketers). Tango has been aggressively courting game developers.

Whatever approaches win out, one thing seems clear: Message apps are flush with cash, and know that they’re sitting on top of an incredibly valuable resource — the time and attention of a young and tech-savvy demographic. Look for a lot of experimentation to happen in the next year or two.

]]>0Dylan’s Desk: Why the coming messaging economy will be very big businessFlow Kana brings social to the medical pot economyhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/flow-kana-brings-social-to-the-medical-pot-economy/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/flow-kana-brings-social-to-the-medical-pot-economy/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:43 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669483The pot startup thinks medical marijuana patients want to talk to the growers, and it is making it possible via Twitter, Facebook, and email.
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This is how much the world has changed in the last few years: Flow Kana, an on-demand medical marijuana delivery platform, has created a system that enables buyers to communicate with growers via social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Flow Kana, which launched today, makes it easy to get convenient deliveries of organic, sustainably grown pot. For now, it is only serving the San Francisco Bay Area, but it says it is hoping to quickly expand to other parts of California and potentially to other states where medical pot is legal.

The company is hardly the only one making discreet marijuana deliver possible. Competitors include The Green Cross, Foggy Daze Delivery, and others. But Flow Kana thinks it’s different because it is specifically making it possible for buyers to communicate directly with the farmers growing their pot.

While that might seem weird, the company thinks some buyers will want to ask the growers what kind of pot will help them with a particular malady, say back pain, or about growing methods so they can feel confident they aren’t going to get any mold in their weed. Other buyers may just want to know a bit about the people who enabled their high, asking, for example, what being a cannabis farmer means to them.

Buyers can use Twitter, Facebook, or email to connect with the growers.

The company hopes that letting buyers talk to their growers will bring a bit of a farm-to-table feel to the pot economy. Especially in places like San Francisco, discerning consumers want the freshest, healthiest produce, and they want to know things about the people growing their eggs, vegetables, and more. Flow Kana clearly believes marijuana fits right into this new dynamic.

]]>0Flow Kana brings social to the medical pot economyNet neutrality beat Llamas on Twitter by just 40k tweetshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/twitter-says-llamas-on-the-lam-got-tweeted-220000-times/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/twitter-says-llamas-on-the-lam-got-tweeted-220000-times/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 22:09:58 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669328Twitter went bonkers Thursday as two llamas roamed the streets in Arizona. There were 220,000 tweets about the saga of the furry animals.
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Escaped llamas took over the Internet Thursday. That’s right, llamas on the lam.

Anyone watching Twitter this afternoon would have seen their feed dominated by news of the animals running around Phoenix.

According to Twitter, the llamas on the loose were a top trending topic in the United States. And by the time the furry beasts were eventually captured — using lassos!! — there had been 220,000 tweets breathlessly reporting on the chase to catch them. These may not be Oscars or Super Bowl numbers, but they’re pretty impressive for a Thursday afternoon when there wasn’t really any other big news — like, say, a major ruling on net neutrality — vying for people’s attention.

Most people, it seems, were enthralled by the spectacle, caught on video from overhead helicopters. It would seem that few wanted the saga to end. In fact, the tech site The Next Web humorously tweeted, “SWITCHES ON OUT OF OFFICE REPLY” and a link to video of the llamas roaming the Arizona streets.

When the llamas were finally, um, in custody, many people expressed ironic annoyance at having to return to their actual workday. Others decided to keep the fun going, and llama-related tweets continued to flow all afternoon. One favorite of mine came from Drew Olanoff, who posted a photo of embattled NBC News anchor Brian Williams with the words, “So there I was chasing some llamas,” a reference to Williams’ debunked claims of having reported from a war zone.

I felt, and many agreed, that this was the best thing on the Internet in ages. One could stop for a moment and think about the fact that the poor llamas were probably scared out of their minds at the chase — which some jokingly compared to the police pursuit of O.J. Simpson on Los Angeles freeways in 1994. But beyond that, it’s clear that this was a singularly fun and humorous moment that countless people on the Internet got sucked in by, and which probably cost the American economy millions, or even billions, of dollars in lost productivity. Because of llamas. Think about that for a moment.

]]>0Net neutrality beat Llamas on Twitter by just 40k tweetsJudge reportedly tries to shut down WhatsApp in Brazilhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/whatsapp-reportedly-ordered-suspended-in-brazil-by-judge/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/whatsapp-reportedly-ordered-suspended-in-brazil-by-judge/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 20:53:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669316The Facebook-owned messaging giant was said to be refusing to participate into an investigation into sexually explicit photos of children posted to the service, according to the AP.
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A Brazilian judge has ordered the hugely popular messaging service WhatsApp to be suspended in that country, according to a report from the Associated Press.

However, the AP wrote, the service is still up and running.

It appears the order stems from WhatsApp’s refusal to participate in an investigation into sexually explicit photos of children being posted on the service.

“The judge would not comment on details of his decision,” the AP wrote, “because it is an ongoing case, but a press officer at the Piaui state’s Public Safety Department says the case is linked to ‘sexually graphic photos of children on the app.'”

WhatsApp did not immediately respond to a VentureBeat request for comment.

]]>0Judge reportedly tries to shut down WhatsApp in BrazilFacebook is patenting a tool that could change the way you schedule meetingshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/facebook-is-patenting-a-tool-that-could-change-the-way-you-schedule-meetings/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/facebook-is-patenting-a-tool-that-could-change-the-way-you-schedule-meetings/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 18:57:36 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1669039Look out, Google Calendar.
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While startups have come up with new ways to find times for people to hold meetings, Facebook has cooked up a system of its own.

Facebook in 2013 submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office an application for a patent called “System and methods for scheduling a meeting.” Today the patent was formally published.

The patent application includes an interesting concept called scoring to identify ideal meeting times and places. And of course, once the meeting organizer has determined the best possible time and place for the meeting, the system can send out calendar invitations.

The technology could have some major implications. It could help Facebook employees plan their meetings efficiently. But it could also become a part of the Facebook experience that hundreds of millions of people use.

And Facebook seems to get that its tool could be useful outside of Facebook. Patent authors John David Egan, Scott MacVicar, and Eric Sumner state:

Calendaring systems may be especially useful for organizations. Organizations can include businesses, schools, non-profits, and other entities. An organization often requires meetings among its members to conduct important business or otherwise advance its objectives through collaboration. However, despite the use of calendaring systems, the ability to schedule and conduct meetings is often complicated by the size and complexity of the organization.

Depending on how widely the system is implemented — if it is ever implemented — it could pose a challenge to existing calendar services, including Google Calendar. Indeed, Facebook has thought about how to make it accessible to lots of people. Potential data sources “may include Microsoft Outlook with Exchange Server or other calendar tool, for instance,” the patent authors wrote.

Facebook didn’t immediately respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment on the patent application.

The system from Facebook takes into consideration where exactly people have to go for an in-person meeting and how long it will take to get there. And “a social networking system” — like Facebook, for example — could be integrated, such that people on the social networks can share their calendars and schedule meetings.

The system looks at people’s statuses — like the dreaded out-of-office (OOF) — to see if meeting times would be convenient. It checks to see whether people are free five minutes before a given meeting time, which presumably means it’s aware of any back-to-back meetings, which can cause people to be late. The system also takes into consideration if people are free five minutes after the meeting. It could rule out rooms that might be too small for a proposed meeting. If proposed meetings fall on weekends or holidays, or before or after certain times, the system can change its score.

It could even acknowledge meeting participants’ tendencies — like “whether an attendee tends to miss or attend meetings on specific days or times in the day,” as the patent authors put it.

Oh, and yes, it’s mobile-friendly.

Here are some more images from the patent application:

Above: From the Facebook patent application entitled “Systems and methods for scheduling a meeting.”

Image Credit: Screen shot

Above: From the Facebook patent application entitled “Systems and methods for scheduling a meeting.”

]]>0Facebook is patenting a tool that could change the way you schedule meetingsHow Bluenose reduced its customers’ time-to-value to a mere 49 dayshttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/how-bluenose-reduced-its-customers-time-to-value-to-a-mere-49-days/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/how-bluenose-reduced-its-customers-time-to-value-to-a-mere-49-days/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 16:38:46 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668889Customer success platform Bluenose claims its time-to-value is faster than all of its competitors'. The reason why provides a lesson that every business can apply.
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When it comes to marketing technology of any kind, whether it be CRM, marketing automation, social media management, or website analytics, only one thing really matters.

The tool you invest in has to make you more money than you spend on it.

The problem with that statement? A lot of what marketers do is hard to quantify, difficult to measure, and is more of an art than a science. The counter-problem? The C-suite wants hard numbers, not flimsy promises of future value.

Bluenose is one company that claims to combine big data analytics with customer success management. In other words, it ties together data from CRM, customer service, billing, surveys, marketing automation platforms, and more into a single view. That view then allows the user to dig into product usage, customer health, lifetime value, and satisfaction data on a customer-by-customer basis.

It sounds big, complicated, and tough to implement, but it turns out that isn’t the case at all.

Revealing details exclusively to VentureBeat today, Bluenose is claiming it has the fastest time-to-value of any customer success platform — a mere 49 days per average implementation. Of course, “implementation” can be a variable definition, so I asked Don MacLennan, CEO and cofounder of Bluenose, to explain further.

“Implementation means time-to-value, which incorporates the installation of our cloud-based software, setup of the system, and team training,” MacLennan said. “So after 49 days [on average], our customers are using our software and gathering insights into their customer base.”

Time-to-value is a subject close to my heart.

In my State of Marketing Technology Winter 2015 report, I looked closely at cost of ownership and return on investment in marketing technologies. Through 2,119 respondents and by analyzing two million martech product logins, I found that the C-suite were most heavily involved in the use of analytics products — at least 3x more so than any other category. Analytics products are also the tools that offer the most quantifiable returns. That level of familiarity, along with the hard figures executives crave, is helping solutions like Bluenose gain market share, along with fans in the boardroom.

This is in stark contrast to, for example, the fortunes of social media management tools among executives. We know that the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies just don’t “get” social from a personal perspective, even if their companies use it to great effect. This is partly due to the difficulty of measuring ROI from those tools, something MacLennan still sees as a challenge for Bluenose too.

“We agree that social media marketing tools are a difficult bracket, and we’ve faced similar issues with our customer success platform,” MacLennan said. “Our focus at Bluenose is helping businesses score their customers’ health and maximize customer monetization through churn reduction, conversion, upselling, and other opportunities. We do see some of the same challenges from a ROI perspective, but our software provides in-depth, data-driven analytics to help the C-suite see ROI from a churn-reduction perspective.”

This ability to help understand and ultimately reduce churn has seen Bluenose add the likes of KISSMetrics, BetterWorks, and PaySimple to its clients roster. “Across our customer base, especially with the advent of SaaS, customer churn can be fatal to the company’s business model,” MacLennan said.

So, how is Bluenose managing to deliver value within an average of 49 days? The solution already has the attention of the C-suite, thanks to it being an analytics tool, and by providing measurable data around the most important people of all — customers. But that only explains why people are interested in products like this, not how Bluenose is managing to provide such a fast return.

“The industry’s time to value — for any marketing solution — is definitely a challenge, and a hurdle for adoption rates among businesses,” MacLennan said. “Deployment is quick, but it takes time to sort through historical data and start deriving insights. Our fast implementation process is due to our refined onboarding process. We have playbooks to integrate strategy with data assessment, both current and historical. Our team at Bluenose also incorporates training into the process to ensure a company is prepared to hit the ground running right from the beginning.”

The lesson to be learned, then? It is the same one that many of Bluenose’s SaaS customers employ too: have a great onboarding experience for your clients.

So what does the future look like for customer success platforms, and how will they help marketers to deliver those sought-after hard ROI figures?

“We believe marketing and customer success platforms will increasingly partner,” MacLennan said. “Marketers will continue to utilize data-driven techniques to to fill the top of the funnel, but SaaS organizations must retain existing customers and keep them happy. This is leading to the rise of lifecycle marketing, and customer success platforms become a vital source of information for marketing because it has a pulse on the customer base.”

Perceived expense is directly proportional to perceived return, and tools like Bluenose make it easy to look at the hard facts and figures associated with every customer. But, as it turns out, this isn’t the main reason for the company’s claim that its time-to-value is faster than the rest of the customer success platform industry. That success comes down to providing as good an onboarding and training experience as possible, a lesson that every business can take something from.

Learn more about total cost of ownership and return on investment across the marketing technology industry in our free webinar.

]]>0How Bluenose reduced its customers’ time-to-value to a mere 49 daysHoping to make clickable brand icons more common in messaging, InMoji nabs $1Mhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/hoping-to-make-clickable-brand-icons-more-common-in-messaging-inmoji-nabs-1m/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/hoping-to-make-clickable-brand-icons-more-common-in-messaging-inmoji-nabs-1m/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 16:30:00 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668258Clicking on an InMoji icon leads a consumer to whatever experience the brand wants -- video or audio content, exclusive offers, or new tools.
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While email has long ago settled in, messaging is still growing. Today, Boston-based InMoji announced it has scored $1 million so it can connect consumers to brands through messaging.

Founded last year, the startup offers clickable icons — called InMoji — that live in a message and can connect you to, say, an offer from Nike.

“Brands get to interact with their customers, [while] customers get to curate and arbitrate their brand interaction and share great content with their friends,” CEO and cofounder Michael Africk told VentureBeat via email.

Consumers are already looking for emoji — small and expressive digital icons — and stickers to send within their messages, he said, so InMoji is just another kind of personalized add-on.

“We are discoverable in the same part of the apps where all other content is found,” he said. “Users click on a [smiley-face-like] icon and are taken to the InMoji experience.”

Africk told us the experience could include “video or audio content discovery, links to exclusive one-time offers, or tools that simplify their messaging and communication process.” Consumers can use the InMoji to send music or movie clips, have coffee or gifts shipped, or convey location information.

He noted that brands — such as current clients Walmart, DraftKings, and Sol Republic — can structure their campaigns as advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsorship, or loyalty programs. Either the sender or the receiver can click on the icon to be taken to the experience.

Brands pay InMoji for access to the messaging providers, since they provide access to the consumers and receive part of the revenue. InMoji, for either Android or iOS, are designed to integrate with “almost any messaging app,” the company said, including social networking, gaming, and dating.

The new seed funding, from ex-Paypal Media COO David Chang with participation from Paypal’s Start Tank, Atlas Venture, and other investors, will be used by the company for product design and development, sales and marketing, and operations.

COO Perry Tell told us that InMoji sees itself as “the next gen of monetization on messaging platforms,” offering an opt-in kind of brand promotion.

“While there are no direct competitors doing exactly what we do,” he said, “there are some blurred lines with some sticker companies.”

Sticker companies similarly “license content and distribute via content stores operated by the apps,” Tell noted, and they “have revenue shares with the content licensors, making this a low margin business.”

He compared the current environment to the mobile wallpaper business of the early 2000s, which later dried up. But InMoji, he noted, has “direct relationships with brands and [creates] custom media experiences which track real-time data, similar to display ads or other online digital media units.”

Messaging apps and some of the larger adtech platform could compete, he added, but “so far it has not been done.”

Social media management platform Sprinklr is acquiring community management platform Pluck, extending its customers’ engagement capabilities beyond third party social networks to their websites.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sprinklr has over 600 employees and has raised $77.5M thus far, including $40M in it’s D round last April. Pluck raised $17M before being acquired by Demand Media in 2008. This marks Sprinklr’s fourth acquisition, after Dachis Group, TBG Digital, and Branderati.

At a time when the number of marketing technologies grows at an unprecedented pace, Sprinklr is aiming to provide an increasingly integrated social platform so brands don’t have to deal with disparate point solutions and data sets.

The social media management market had just 31 immature vendors in 2011. Since then the market has grown, then contracted, and now matured.

Sprinklr’s latest acquisition reflects maturity in the social media management market, but also raises the question of how far individual social platforms can go. Social media was once treated as an experimental island by marketing departments, but for most brands today it’s an important part of a broader, multi-channel engagement strategy.

The marketing cloud vendors each have social components: most notably Salesforce acquired Buddy Media and Radian6, Adobe acquired Context Optional (Efficient Frontier), and Oracle bought Vitrue and Involver. They may not be recognized as best-in-class, but at some point they will claim greater integration.

As much as Sprinklr and other social media management players like Hootsuite and Spredfast grow their capabilities, customers will eventually expect greater cross-channel coordination and integration.

The standalone enterprise social vendors still have time to address that concern, and may be able to develop ecosystem partnerships to provide their customers with this better integration. For example, Hootsuite has partnered with Marketo, to connect social interactions to lead databases.

For those standalone social players that have made it this far, the primary competition will soon be changing from other social vendors to the bigger, multi-channel marketing cloud solutions.

]]>0Sprinklr acquires Pluck, continuing the consolidation in social media managementVurb launches its uber-app as the conductor of your app symphonyhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/vurb-launches-its-uber-app-as-the-conductor-of-your-app-symphony/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/vurb-launches-its-uber-app-as-the-conductor-of-your-app-symphony/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 14:00:17 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1664527Instead of trudging through siloed apps, you open Vurb and search within such categories as Places, Movies, TV, Videos, and Music to access data from the associated apps.
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“If I’m looking for a movie, I open a movie app like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes,” Vurb CEO and founder Bobby Lo laid out for VentureBeat.

That’s followed by getting tickets in the Fandango app, looking for a restaurant near the movie theater in Yelp or Foursquare, and so on. The downside of “there’s an app for that” is that there’s a darn app for every … separate … thing.

Vurb wants to transcend that app craziness by serving as a kind of conductor of the app symphony. The free app launches today in Apple’s App Store, with an Android version expected in several months.

“What’s missing,” Lo told me, “is a way to make the experience more fluid” by getting apps to interoperate.

Instead of traipsing through relatively siloed apps — or, worse yet, trying to plan your evening through searches that will lead you to mobile web pages and apps — you open Vurb and search within such available-at-launch categories as Places, Movies, TV, Videos, and Music.

A Vurb Card, the app’s key unit, shows nearby movies and their details. You can pick a movie and, when you click to buy tickets, you’re taken into Fandango. You can return to Vurb via the iPhone’s app switcher.

Similarly, a user can search or browse nearby restaurants, and then go into OpenTable to book a reservation. It’s kind of like an actionable browser for apps.

As you build your evening plans, your decisions or tentative choices can be saved and shared on the Cards, and those Cards can be saved as a Deck.

Friends can share Cards or Decks, and Vurb has started to get public decks generated, such as chef Michael Mina’s deck of “Best Places in the U.S. for Cocktails.” You can create and share a deck to suggest “Our Plans for Tonight,” and your friends can then correct all your bad choices.

Vurb deep-links into the apps, with data often carried along. For instance, clicking on the ticket-buying link in Vurb for a specific showing of Birdman takes you right to that movie at the theater you wanted, in Fandango. Partnering apps at launch — Tastemade, Foursquare, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, and CBS Interactive’s Metacritic — offer their data on Vurb’s servers, while other apps’ data is accessed through their APIs.

If the user clicks to buy tickets, for instance, but doesn’t have the Fandango app installed, Vurb takes you to Fandango’s mobile web page. If an app is not installed and there’s no mobile web site, such as with Uber, Vurb takes you to the required app in the App Store. After the app is installed, the user can return to Vurb to pick up where they left off.

One question about Vurb is whether most users are prepared for yet another app on top of their existing apps. You still have to go into various apps to make transactions, so it’s not like you’re done with app-juggling.

Second, why isn’t there such a task-oriented app browser at the system level in iOS and Android?

But there isn’t, so Vurb may fit the bill.

“Think of us as the router as you’re starting a process,” Lo said. “Vurb is your way of connecting to the right app and surfacing that info.”

The San Francisco-based Vurb has raised $10 million since its founding in 2011, and is currently focused on building an installed base. At a later point, Lo said, the company will look to monetize through “things like app installs” and affiliate fees.

Vurb’s key competitor, Lo said, is mobile search, which he described as “broken” in part because it takes you to starting points on web pages or apps.

“What we’re trying to do,” he told us, “is not just find the starting point of a task, but to navigate through it” by acting as a hub.

]]>0Vurb launches its uber-app as the conductor of your app symphonyFacebook introduces new features to report and support users who seem suicidalhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/facebook-introduces-new-features-to-report-and-support-users-who-seem-suicidal/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/facebook-introduces-new-features-to-report-and-support-users-who-seem-suicidal/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 12:40:21 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668897New services will allow the company to more directly intervene when users post messages that indicate troubled or depressed feelings.
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In a significant expansion of its personal crisis features, Facebook announced today that it would be rolling out new services that allow the company to more directly intervene when users post messages that indicate troubled or depressed feelings.

“Today, at our fifth Compassion Research Day, we announced updated tools that provide more resources, advice and support to people who may be struggling with suicidal thoughts and their concerned friends and family members,” the company wrote in a post.

Suicide prevention has been a big issue for Facebook, raising questions of just how far the social media giant should go in monitoring and responding to content that indicates a person may be in distress.

More than three years ago, Facebook created a suicide reporting system that allowed users to fill out a form to report troubling messages. Through a partnership with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Facebook would then send an email to the person who posted the message to suggest they get help if necessary.

To expand those suicide prevention services, Facebook said it worked with a number of mental health organizations, including Forefront, Now Matters Now, Save.org, and the Lifeline.

With the new tools, Facebook plans to move beyond just referring people to other organizations. If someone’s post has been reported as possibly indicating suicidal thoughts, they will now receive a direct message from Facebook asking them if they need help.

The recipient can then click a button indicating they want support, and the message will then ask if they want to connect directly with a friend to talk, or get tips directly from someone at Facebook. The person will still also be encouraged to connect with someone at Lifeline to talk.

Likewise, for the person who reported the messages, Facebook is adding a new feature that lets them call or message the distressed friend. Also, if necessary, that person can also ask for support.

Facebook said the new tools will appear in the next couple of months in the U.S. and Canada. And the company said it is looking to expand similar services around the world.

]]>0Facebook introduces new features to report and support users who seem suicidalSprinklr buys social community provider Pluck off of Demand Mediahttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/sprinklr-buys-social-community-provider-pluck-off-of-demand-media/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/26/sprinklr-buys-social-community-provider-pluck-off-of-demand-media/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 12:30:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668673New York-based Sprinklr has bought a handful of companies in its quest to become a publicly traded, full-featured social media tool. Other recent acquisitions include Branderati, Dachis Group, and TBG Digital.
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Sprinklr wants to be a complete social media solution for big companies as it prepares to go public. So it went and bought “community” website component provider Pluck away from Demand Media — seven years after Demand acquired Pluck.

Sprinklr will officially announce the deal later today, but it won’t be revealing the terms of the deal.

Pluck offers tools like forums, reviews, and galleries that companies can add to their applications. Pluck claims more than 600 customers, including Mattel, Nestle, Whole Foods Market, and Walgreens. And now all that business and all those tools are heading over to Sprinklr.

“When we had the opportunity to talk to Demand Media and understand there was an opportunity to acquire Pluck, we pounced all over it,” Sprinklr founder and chief executive Ragy Thomas told VentureBeat in an interview.

Demand Media simply didn’t turn out to be the best mode for Pluck, said Josh Teitelman, Pluck’s vice president and general manager.

“For an enterprise platform that sits within a media company, it was more of a question of whether it was a true fit or not,” Teitelman said.

New York-based Sprinklr has bought a handful of companies in its quest to become a full-featured social media tool for businesses and become publicly traded, possibly later this year. Other recent acquisitions include Branderati, Dachis Group, and TBG Digital.

Thomas believes the Pluck acquisition should help companies use one piece of software — not two or more — to see what happens in social channels like Facebook and Twitter and then what happens later, when people actually go on to check out products elsewhere online.

“We’ll have a holistic view of interaction,” Thomas said.

Pluck started in 2003 and is based in Austin, Texas. All members of the Pluck team are joining Sprinklr, Thomas said.

]]>0Sprinklr buys social community provider Pluck off of Demand MediaGoogle Plus for mobile gets a redesign and a speed boosthttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-plus-for-mobile-gets-a-redesign-and-a-speed-boost/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-plus-for-mobile-gets-a-redesign-and-a-speed-boost/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 02:27:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668728Google originally launched Google Plus four years ago in answer to the growing success of Facebook.
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Google says it has added some new design elements and speed to its Google Plus social network running on mobile devices.

“Starting today on mobile web, you’ll see a beautiful new stream design, improved sharing flow and a much faster experience,” Google writes on its (surprise!) Google Plus page.

Google Plus’s new face does look pretty on my new Motorola E phone, incorporating some of the vibe of Material Design, a design aesthetic used in Google’s Android OS. Indeed, Google executives have said that the Material Design guidelines would start to migrate across Google properties.

Posts seem to load up faster, too.

The improvements, Google says, will work on both phones and tablets.

Google originally launched Google Plus in June 2011 ago in answer to the growing success of Facebook. But it may have been too late, as many consumers preferred to stick with Facebook and have been reluctant to use multiple social networks.

]]>0Google Plus for mobile gets a redesign and a speed boostIsraeli company Face-Six promises to ID faces in photos with machine learninghttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/israeli-company-face-six-promises-to-id-faces-in-photos-with-machine-learning/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/israeli-company-face-six-promises-to-id-faces-in-photos-with-machine-learning/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 23:02:55 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668356What started off as an application to identify actors while watching TV became the Face-Six company, whose first low cost product enables facial recognition from still photos. “We’re seeing a great demand coming from the market, estimated at $50 billion per year,” says Moshe Greenshpan, the company’s CEO.
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What started off as an application to identify actors while watching TV became the Face-Six company, whose first low cost product enables facial recognition from still photos.

“We’re seeing a great demand coming from the market, estimated at $50 billion per year,” says Moshe Greenshpan, the company’s CEO.

It all began four years ago, when an application to identify actors while watching TV was born.

“I’m a movie fun, and when I first came across Shazam, the connection was quite immediate,” says Greenshpan, 43, a resident of Tel Aviv. “The idea to create something similar seemed to be obvious, because you’re always watching a movie and asking yourself, ‘Where do I know that actor from?’ That’s how the idea was born, and we took it further.”

Greenshpan decided to fund the initiative on his own and not raise capital from investors. “I realized that I was much better at finding customers than I was at raising capital,” he explained. “I wouldn’t turn down an investment but I preferred to devote my time to developing the technology and finding customers, instead of putting that aside to devote all my time and energy to raising money.”

“Since the revenue from the app wasn’t on the horizon,” Greenshpan continued, “and I had to carry on funding the company’s activities, the natural way for me was to sell our developments to institutional clients. So, in essence, Face-Six.com was born.”

How does your technology work?

“Face-Six integrates well-known image processing algorithms with innovative algorithms from the world of artificial intelligence.”

“We’re talking about a machine learning algorithm, which is created by the computer and not by an engineer. The computer learns to develop the algorithm from a wide sample of pictures of faces and their known identification. That way, the computer learns the connections from every observation and produces a smart algorithm.”

Large clients

At the start, Greenshpan recruited staff, including a CTO, a chief scientist, three engineers, and an SVP of sales. At first, the company’s employees worked from home, around the clock. In recent months, the staff has been operating out of RishonStartUP, a start-ups compound based in Rishon Letzion, on the suburbs of Tel Aviv. “It’s fun to work in an environment like that,” says Greenshpan, “even if mutual inspiration isn’t intentional. When you’re half listening to things and are exposed to initiatives, it happens along the way.”

In the period of less than a year, the company managed to deploy software pilots at large companies, including an Israeli security organization, security forces of a Caribbean country, one of the largest casinos in Asia, and a criminal identification lab for the Indian government.

What reactions have you had to the pilots?

“In spite of the website’s success and our ability to reach big clients, the complexity of the hardware-software solution, which entails connecting and calibrating cameras and servers, and also the need to be on the client’s site in order to implement the system, made the solution expensive and made the sales cycle too long – between a year and two years, as is customary in this field. In addition, it became clear to us that 99 percent of the thousands of clients that turned to us couldn’t afford paying for an expensive project.”

Were there moments of despair, did you give up?

“We didn’t give up, but there were moments of frustration. When you are good enough to reach big clients, but you don’t succeed in selling – not because the product’s not good, but because it’s expensive – that’s frustrating. We didn’t have to be geniuses to understand that there’s a huge market which hasn’t been tapped yet because of a technological gap and high prices. That, in essence, was how the idea was born to develop low cost applications for the face recognition market.” That was also the point at which the goddess of luck knocked on the door of Greenshpan and his company, when a few clients agreed to fully fund the development of such products.

We remember another Israeli company that dealt with facial recognition, purchased by Facebook.

“That Israeli company [Face.com] was nicely sold to Facebook, primarily thanks to a feature that enabled automatic tagging of friends’ pictures. They also offered a specific solution to developers working with still photos. We are turning to the consumer market, mainly to the end user, with a wide variety of video applications.

What about privacy issues?

Of course, it’s possible to exploit the technology in a harmful way, much like bugging phones or hacking computers. But, as you know, the bottom line is that the responsibility is in the hands of the user. These days, the subject occupies those who fight for freedom and individual privacy, principally in the US. The FBI launched an impressive facial recognition project valued at over $1 billion last year, and the fears are caused mostly by Big Brother policies and less by consumer users.”

First in a series

Last month, the company released its first product in a series of products. The product, called Churchix.com, enables facial recognition from still photos and is part of the event attendance space. “Amazingly,” says Greenshpan, “Churchix was originally developed by us for a chain of international churches, which wanted to follow up with membership attendance at its events. Today it’s being used at a number of other churches in the US and in Indonesia.”

Who is Churchix meant for?

“Because of its capabilities, Churchix is suitable for churches, administrators of communities, for event photographers, and for sports photographers, who are interested in identifying guests and athletes.”

Is there interest?

“There is a great interest. Another interested client who began using the software recently is the DNA Bank of India. In India, a large portion of the population doesn’t have identification documents. Since the registration system isn’t fully institutionalized, there’s a big problem in identifying people in government offices. One of the solutions is facial recognition to verify people’s identity. That’s the solution the Bank adopted, and it uses our technology in order to verify the members in its database.”

There’s this perception that the facial recognition market is narrow and niche.

“With the vast experience we’ve accumulated, we can say with full confidence that this perception is completely mistaken. When we talk about the civic face recognition market we mean shops, restaurants, offices, factories, buildings, gyms, home owners and basically everyone with a camera.

We’re seeing a huge demand coming from a market that we estimate at $50 billion per year. As a ground-breaking player in this market, we believe that, God willing, we’ll conquer a big chunk of the market with additional innovative and more complex applications.”

]]>0Israeli company Face-Six promises to ID faces in photos with machine learningTwitter just launched an official WordPress plugin for publishershttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/twitter-just-launched-an-official-wordpress-plugin-for-publishers/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/twitter-just-launched-an-official-wordpress-plugin-for-publishers/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 20:14:33 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1668391The features are largely covered already by third-party plugins, but Twitter can update an official plugin as its platform changes.
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Today Twitter announced the launch of its first official plugin for WordPress.

The plugin, available on WordPress.org and GitHub, bundles together a couple of features largely provided by third-party plugins, including the ability to embed tweets, the ability to embed videos uploaded to Twitter, as well as tweet and follow buttons.

It’s interesting to see the above features only arrive on WordPress now, seeing as the content management system (CMS) already natively renders Twitter links as embedded Tweets. It’s noteworthy, however, that an official plugin may yield better results for certain publishers — Twitter can update this plugin as it wishes whenever its platform changes.

]]>0Twitter just launched an official WordPress plugin for publishers5 fresh startups that are shaking up sales automationhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/5-fresh-startups-that-are-shaking-up-sales-automation/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/5-fresh-startups-that-are-shaking-up-sales-automation/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 16:00:50 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1667009Guest:Selling is hard. Luckily, some cool new sales automation tools are making life easier for today's road warriors, reps, and outcriers.
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Sales is tough. Selling is hard.

Luckily, there are some cool new sales automation tools out there making life easier for today’s road warriors, reps, and outcriers.

Below are some new tools from startups that can give you a significant time and training edge over your competition.

Close.io: Make calls and send emails from the CRM

Close.io allows a salesperson to do one-click calling and emailing from within their app, and then automatically logs those calls and emails into a prospect’s profile, eliminating the tedious and error-prone data entry that takes away time from making calls.

Close.io also allows salespeople to filter their lead lists based on the actions they’ve taken, such as showing all leads where a call has been made and an email has been sent, which is handy for knowing which prospects require what followup.

Finally, it has a very handy ‘Opportunities’ feature that shows all the leads at a glance for each week, along with their expected value and likelihood of closing that you’ve assigned them.

Integrations: Most importantly, for those transitioning from other CRMs, Close.io has a CSV bulk upload tool, and multiple connections from Zapier, including Gmail, Wufoo, and Mailchimp.

Accuvit.io: Transcripts of sales calls

Training new phone salespeople is difficult. Sales manuals can struggle to give proper context, and it can be daunting for a new recruit to listen to hours of previously recorded sales calls. Accuvit allows a sales group to record and transcribe all of their calls in near real time. These then become searchable as text, and Accuvit also uses data mining technology to find patterns in the best and worst calls.

The sales manager can then distribute transcripts of the best and worst calls, calling attention to what approaches worked and what didn’t, how to handle specific objections, or what the best way is to discuss a particular feature. Since we can read much faster than we can listen, this allows a new salesperson to easily absorb the collective wisdom of many previous calls, and try out bits and pieces of dialogue to see what works best with his own personality.

Integrations: Accuvit only has one integration, but that one integration is Salesforce, so it should be fairly easy to get started.

Sendbloom.co: Mass customization of outbound sales emails

In the past, salespeople had two approaches for sending cold emails to new prospects: a mass email or a custom email. The problem with the mass email is that it produces low engagement, as it doesn’t speak to the unique qualities of the customer. The custom email takes minutes to produce, and is impractical at scale.

Sendbloom offers a great solution to this problem. The company’s service takes your lead list and enriches it with data from public and private sources, and then makes these fields available to your email templates. You can now segment your email templates according to factors like location, industry, job role, etc. to create a much more targeted and effective message.

Integrations: Sendbloom offers connections to Salesforce and Gmail, and has an in-browser editor to edit any CSV you upload.

Assistant.to: Speeding up appointment setting

How much time do you waste going back and forth trying to set up meeting times? Assistant.to neatly solves this problem by allowing you to populate the bottom of your email post with free meeting slots you’ve selected from Google Calendar. When a prospect clicks on a time, a meeting is automatically scheduled and you both receive confirmations.

Integration: One-click integration with Gmail and Google Calendar.

Zeemaps.com: Custom maps of prospects, customers, and competitors

Can a custom map make you more effective as a salesperson? Absolutely. If your company sells off a franchise model, you have Google maps open all day to make sure that any prospects are a minimum distance away from existing customers. Or you need to look on a map to find nearby reference customers for a prospect to contact. Or you might want to locate prospects that are near certain competitors.

Zeemaps is a dead simple, free-to-start service that allows you to upload a spreadsheet of locations and instantly create a custom map that you can share with your sales group. It allows you to add colored markers, so you can indicate whether a location is a prospect, customer, or competitor, and to add custom fields, such as phone number and website, as well as the ability to shade regions to mark off territories.

It also supports a zooming feature where if you click on a location, the number of locations that’s shown as a single number expands into a list of the actual map points.No more flipping back and forth between several different maps, and doing lots of Google map searches while talking to prospects.